FAAC or LAME

[aketon]

Hello,

if you are in about to choose between these two encoders (FAAC 1.24 - Lame 3.96) to encode your music, which one will you prefer!
And what options are you using with them?

[Soulhunter]

FAAC does compress much better than MP3 IMHO, but MP3 has still more HW/SW support !!!

I usually use relative high bitrates (AAC @ 192kbps / MP3 @ 256kbps) to store my music... ;)

Read also thus (http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/results.html) comparison !!!


Bye

[bond]

faac should provide better quality than lame at 128kbps and below, for higher bitrates its not so clear as lame, in contrary to faac, is highly tuned for these bitrate ranges

[aketon]

Thanks for answering and for the info!

Well, I have a lot of audio cd and I want to rip them in my PC! After some tests I made myself too, I think that aac is defenitely better than any mp3 encoder! I believe that using -q 120 in faac is very good in nearly every song I 've got!!!

Bye!

[hans-jürgen]

Originally posted by aketon
Well, I have a lot of audio cd and I want to rip them in my PC! OK, but if you ever get interested in transcoding multichannel content from DVDs, there's no way to do that with LAME. ;) I did some tests recently for appropriate FAAC settings that compress the AC-3 track to ~50% or less, you can find that thread in this forum.

After some tests I made myself too, I think that aac is defenitely better than any mp3 encoder! I believe that using -q 120 in faac is very good in nearly every song I 've got!!! Thanks, during testing and tuning I didn't find a LAME encoding (v3.93.1 at that time) either that would have been better (except with very outdated FAAC versions), but there were some samples that sounded better with FAAC. Using -q 120 is a reasonable setting for plain audio encoding from CD, it results in ~141 kbps/stereo for ct_reference.wav with a cutoff at 18.4 kHz (v1.24). You might consider to lower this cutoff with the -c setting, too, if you find that you can't detect a difference to e.g. -c 16000, because this would save you some more bits.

[aketon]

OK, thanks for the info on FAAC hans-jürgen! I am going to do some more tests before I start to rip my songs into my PC! Right now I am searching for info on what cutoff is and what it does!!! :rolleyes:

[hans-jürgen]

Originally posted by aketon
OK, thanks for the info on FAAC hans-jürgen! I am going to do some more tests before I start to rip my songs into my PC! A wise decision... :)

Right now I am searching for info on what cutoff is and what it does!!! :rolleyes: That's the frequency where the lowpass filter starts to cut off all higher frequencies, so everything above that limit will not be encoded at all. I just did a quick test with the same sample (ct_reference.wav) and an additional -c 16000 on the command line, and the resulting bitrate is ~130 kbps/stereo for the AAC file. This will shrink another 3 kbps if you choose the MP4 container as output, i.e. ~127 kbps/stereo VBR.

You can find a table with some recommended settings and more information about FAAC in the Wiki of Audiocoding.com:

http://www.audiocoding.com/wiki/index.php?page=FAAC#three

By the way, if you are also using foobar2000, you can download the latest compile of foo_faac.dll (the GUI for FAAC) from Case's site:

http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/foobar2000/?C=M;O=D

[aketon]

Thanks for the web pages! I found nearly whatever I wanted to know in http://www.audiocoding.com/wiki!

Oh, and one more question please!:D

Do you think that leaving FAAC to encode in MPEG-2 AAC is a good idea? I read somewhere that apple doesn't like it and it only accepts MPEG4-AAC! What should I do??? Does this change affects quality?

[hans-jürgen]

Originally posted by aketon
Do you think that leaving FAAC to encode in MPEG-2 AAC is a good idea? I read somewhere that apple doesn't like it and it only accepts MPEG4-AAC! What should I do??? It depends what you have in mind with your files: if you have a hardware portable like a Philips Expanium CD player, a new Nokia mobile phone or the Siemens/O2 Digital Music Player, it's necessary to use MPEG-2 AAC LC files, because they don't know the MP4 container format. If you plan to send your files to Apple users, they should have either the *.mp4 or *.m4a file extension (for iTunes), otherwise they won't play. FAAC v1.24 defaults to MPEG-4 AAC LC files with *.m4a extension if you enable the -w switch on the command line. If you use it in a GUI like EAC or CDex, you would have to use the -o switch for output file name and set the file extension to *.mp4 or *.m4a in the GUI (-w is not necessary then, because the file extension triggers the wrapping to the MP4 container automatically).

Does this change affects quality? No, the sound is exactly the same, only the headers in the file change, that's also the reason why the AAC file with ADTS headers per frame are a little bit bigger than the MP4 files with a raw AAC bitstream.

[aketon]

Well, as I am not going to play my music in any hardware player, I believe that the -w switch in FAAC will be always on!
Anyway, thanks a lot for the help you gave me!:)
It is really nice to have people that help you understand new things!!!!:thanks:


Bye Bye Bye

[hans-jürgen]

Originally posted by aketon
Well, as I am not going to play my music in any hardware player, I believe that the -w switch in FAAC will be always on! That's OK, I only mentioned these players, because it's a common misunderstanding that Apple's iPod would be the only one which supports the AAC/MP4 format. By the way, I forgot to add the Diva GEM, a nice new FlashROM player with external memory card which also decodes AAC files, but very likely not MP4.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the help you gave me!:)
It is really nice to have people that help you understand new things!!!!:thanks: You're welcome. :)

[JoaCHIP]

Actually the latest test i recently did comparing Lame 3.96.1 against Faac 1.24.1 showed that Lame is way better than FAAC at all bitrates. I was especially surprised to see that even low frequency content was altered a lot by FAAC.

I tested at both appx. 185 kbit (vbr) and appx. 34 kbit (vbr).

Notice: This was not a listening test but a digital comparison (i was doing several tests like subtracting the encoded-decoded signal with the original and also doing frequency analysis and such.) Listening tests are more unreliable and subjective.

[xyloy]

Lame for me. ;)

Still, if you want a better AAC encoder, choose CT AAC(MeGUI or MediaCoder 0.3.9) or Nero AAC(with neroraw.exe given with MeGUI, not the old Nero 6's dlls)

[shon3i]

FAAC is now very old encoder and can't be compared to other, only CT, Nero (CLI), and apple are good encoders

[SeeMoreDigital]

I'm currently using Coding Technologies AAC encoder with BeLight.

I've found it generates truly excellent sounding 6Ch AAC-HE encodes at just 128Kbps... Not done so much with 2Ch encoding with it though ;)

[bond]

iirc latest lame should beat faac at 128kbps, dunno about lower bitrates

[gURuBoOleZ]

faac and LAME were both tested (but not directly compared) on my 80 kbps (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=35438&st=0&p=312296&#entry312296) and 96 kbps (http://forum.hardware.fr/hardwarefr/VideoSon/MP3-WMA-AAC-OGG-qualite-kbps-evaluation-sujet-84950-1.htm) listening tests (based on 185 samples). I could confirm that faac is really awful at low bitrate and definitely sound poorer than LAME and probably some other MP3 encoder. At 128 kbps difference is less shoking. I guess that faac wasn't really tuned for bitrate < 100 kbps.
Anyway, the encoder is currently in mothballs and shouldn't be used (and two years threads shouldn't be resurrected ;))